I’m a Numbers Gal!

Drowning in Paper?

According to The Paperless Project there are some significant cost savings in eliminating paper. Let’s put this in perspective and review some of their facts:

15% of an organization’s revenues are spent creating, managing and distributing documents.

60% of employee time is spent working with documents.

85% of business documents are in paper form.

The average document is printed 5 times and copied 9 to 11 times.

At $30/hour, knowledge workers waste $4,500 per year working with paper.

In the last 20 years, combined usage of top 10 paper users jumped from 92 to 208 million tons, with growth at 126%

Paper in an average business grows by 22% per year, meaning your paper will double in 3.3 years.

Let’s look at some facts on the costs of paper:

Filing costs an average of $20 per document.

Every 12 filing cabinets requires a additional employee to maintain.

Each misfiled document costs $125 and each lost document costs $350 to $700.

The average time to retrieve and re-file a paper document is 10 minutes.

It costs about $25,000 to fill a four-drawer filing cabinet and over $2,100 to maintain it.

Each day one billion photocopies are made.

The average worker has a 34 hour paper backlog.

Amazing isn’t it? I am a firm believer in being paperless but find the majority of society makes that a very hard objective. Here are some of the ways I manage to save a few trees and have less paper to deal with.

Online Bill Pay with my bank or automated bank withdrawals.

Paperless statements from vendors who email notice when statement is ready so I can save to my computer.

Request all information be emailed rather than mailed allowing me to save to my computer.

Bookkeeping software for business and personal finances: scan receipts to attach to records and then shred the paper.

Client Portal for secure exchange of documents and information on my website.